Just last weekend I spent some time in the beautiful Sandwood Bay in the highlands of Scotland. For those of you who don't know, I live in Scotland.

A four mile walk into a lovely remote bay with ample sand dunes, expansive beaches and even the story of a ghost, it was a must see on my list for some time.

Doing a lot of traveling, it's often easy to neglect your own country but I have to say that over the past eight years, I've become more and more appreciative of my home land. Nothing else seems to beat it (but I'm sure that's just my own patriotism coming into the equation).

Anyway, these were all taken with the 5D, some ND grads and a good tripod. The evening light on Saturday was really beautiful and we'd just got there, so it was hard to find a vantage point while the light was fading, so I ended up running around the bay like a madman for a couple of hours. I like to work quickly - that's where the excitement comes in.

But what are you trying to do with your photography? When you take an image, do you have a reason for doing so? i.e, what drives you forward?

For me, I think we go about our daily lives - living within a set of parameters that don't give us time to think beyond that. I love going out side those parameters - just being on a remote beach late at night gives a different sense of perspective to my life. Listening to the waves crash, feeling isolated on that beach, I find that I'm aware of being in a different existence. I'm no hippy, but there is something rather compelling about spending time on your own in a beautiful, remote place. I also like to produce images that are a departure from the everyday, and shooting late at night or during nocturnal hours can provide that. Look at the last image in particular, the moon is in the sky, the light is low and the tide is moving in fast. I don't often get to experience moments like this throughout my daily life, and that is why photography is so great. It gets you out there, not only to make pictures, but to experience an existence outside of the parameters of your normal daily life.

This is the first image I made and thought 'wow'. I was around 22 years old at the time and I didn't know very much about photography at all.

I'd just got my first camera for a year - a Canon EOS 650, which at the time was very sophisticated. It had autofocus and a really impressive built in meter. But I was always coming home with really crap shots.

And that wasn't the cameras fault.

Then one day, I learned something that changed everything for me. I discovered the magical qualities of light and composition. I'd never really thought about it before, but if you get great light, great subject matter and are able to compose a shot in such a way that it just seems to 'work', then you're potentially on your way to creating a very fine image indeed.

So this was shot on Agfachrome, which I bought cheap in a bargain bin at my local photo place, with an EOS 650 camera which you can pick up for around £60 here in the UK, with a wide angle lens on it.

That was it. Oh, and stunning lighting, an exceptionally thunderous August evening around 9pm plus some great subject matter. I'm going to give myself a little credit too - an operator that recognized a potentially good image and after some stumbling around a field searching for a good angle of view, was able to pull off a nice composition.

I took other shots that night and although they all have the same lighting, and subject, this one really stood out because the composition was just 'right'.

So if you want to make good photographs, you just need a tool that you are comfortable with and gives you good enough resolution that you are happy with (I have this printed up to 24 inches wide, framed in my home).

But above all else, you need a desire to get out there with what you have and make pictures. That's what it's all about really.